Pentecost VII
2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
THE ANSWER IS: 42. . . . Or that’s what Douglas Adams might say. In his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer is asked the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” and 7½ million years later it spits out the answer: It’s 42.[1] Now stay with me – the Letter to the Ephesians gives us an answer to the Ultimate Question, it’s just not 42. Almost every Sunday through the end of August, we’re reading from Ephesians, a letter either from Paul the Apostle or a disciple of Paul’s, [2] which tries to explain God’s plan for his creation. What’s the meaning of life? What are we doing here? How does all this end? If you ask the guy on the street what the Bible is, you’d likely hear “a set of rules about how to be a good person,” but it’s not. Remarkably, we’ve lost the sense that the Bible is one great story, the OT and New, start to finish (as my pastor in Mississippi would say “From Genesis to the maps”), it’s a single narrative that follows the arc of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration – God created a good world, but sin and death came into it, so he came into it to destroy sin and death, and now his unfolding plan is to put the entire creation right. Ephesians starts out talking about “the mystery of God’s will” (1:9) and his plan to “gather up all things” in Jesus, and today chapter 2 gives us a glimpse inside to see just how God is carrying it out. What it’s telling us is to look in two directions – (1) Look back: God tore down a wall; and (2) Look ahead: God is building a temple.
First, Look back: God tore down a wall – Today’s reading starts by telling us to look backward, to “remember” that Gentiles were once without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. (2:12) It’s much harder now for us to remember what the Christians in the first century knew from personal experience, which is that there was a time when they were cut off from God. They couldn’t go to into the temple in Jerusalem; in fact, in the temple courts there was one for the priests, one for Jewish men and one for Jewish women, all on one level; but the outer court where the Gentiles could go was on a lower level, and when they looked up to where the Jews worshiped, Gentiles saw a 1½ meter stone fence upon which was written not “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” but “Trespassers will be executed.”[3] They were on the wrong side of a wall, but not just the wall between them and the Jews; the ultimate wall between humanity and God himself because of human sin.
Talking about sin isn’t the most popular thing to do in a lot of churches these days. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, wrote a little book called Speaking of Sin, in which she said
I want to focus on a small cluster of words that seem to be hard for many people to pronounce, especially in twenty-first century North America. “Sin” heads the list, followed by “damnation,” “repentance,” “penance” and “salvation” . . . . When these words are pronounced out loud, many of them sound like language from an earlier age, when human relationship with God was laced with blame and threat. As old as the words are, they are still redolent with guilt. We may not know exactly what they mean, but we know that they judge us. The most obvious solution to the discomfort they provoke is to stop saying them altogether, which is what many of us have done.[4]
But for God to carry out his plan and put the world to rights, ignoring the wall and ignoring sin wasn’t an option. If we want the answer to the question of the meaning of everything, we have to reckon with the sin that made God’s plan for his creation jump the track. Sin is the problem, but notice God didn’t fix the problem by saying “All Gentiles can be saved . . . just go become Jews,” that is to say, he didn’t fix it with religion. But he also didn’t say “Gentiles are alright, but all you Jews have to leave all your Jewishness,” so he didn’t fix it with irreligion. He fixed the problem for both groups, the ones near to him and the ones far from him, the religious and the irreligious, in the same way, not by making everyone keep Torah like the Jews or by throwing the law out to make room for pagans, the non-religious. You see, the real problem wasn’t that there was this law the Jews kept to try to get to God, and that law stood as a wall between Jews and Gentiles. The ultimate problem was that keeping the law didn’t heal the hearts of the law-keepers. Religious observance never gets us to God. He had to come to us. So Ephesians says: Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ . . . in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall [of] hostility between us. (Eph. 2:13-14) Now everyone has access to God because Jesus kept the law, and his death, resurrection and ascension tore down the wall sin had put up. Ephesians tells us to look back; remember that.
But also, Look ahead: God is building a temple – You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (2:19-22) The wall coming down was a once-for-all event, but the temple building project moves. It has a trajectory; it is ongoing and won’t stop until God completes it. But what is a temple, anyway? A temple is a house where a god lives. The OT prophets said that one day all the nations would stream to “the mountain of the Lord’s house,” to his temple. (Isa. 2:1-5; Mic. 4:1-5) And in today’s reading, Nathan the prophet upbraided King David for saying he would build God a house of cedar, and he said “after you’re dead, David, I will set up thy seed after thee . . . and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son.” (2 Sam. 7:12-14) This image of the temple in Ephesians says those prophecies are being fulfilled right now because “Gentiles have been brought near to God, and along with Jews they have become the new temple, the place where God’s presence dwells.”[5]
Go back to the story-arc of the bible: Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration/Re-creation. In Genesis, God created a world where he could live right alongside humans, but the Fall erected the wall of sin that divided us from God, so God had to come “redeem” us, and now we’re building toward . . . what? The time when we’ll all be floating around on a cloud after we die? No. Absolutely not. Read Revelation 21 – Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . . . And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God . . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” (Rev. 21:1-3) That’s a God-house; it’s a temple. And he’s building it now, Jews and Gentiles together, a re-created humanity being “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” (Eph. 2:22)
So if we’re looking back and we’re looking ahead, what will our lives look like? First, when we understand God tore down the wall of sin and the wall of religion, we can’t feel superior to anyone because of our own particular religious observance. We can’t feel superior, even to people who don’t consider themselves religious or whose religion looks very different from ours, because remember the pious and religious aren’t on one level anymore while the irreligious, impious and pagan are on another level. Nobody is accepted by God except by grace, and since God’s been gracious to us, we can be gracious to others, accept and respect and serve and love them because we remember what we once were – cut off, separated, aliens from God and from his people. So there’s no room for pride.
Also, if God is building his temple here and now, then every deed is another “brick.” Every act has significance. Every thing we do to build the kingdom of God now rings into eternity. Every word said in kindness, every sinner brought to grace, every hungry person fed and hurting person healed – brick by brick by brick God builds until, as Ephesians says, he gathers up all things in Christ and the dwelling of God is with mortals.
So remember who you were. Remember there was no wall so great that God wouldn’t blow it to pieces to get to you. Then: build. Go out and serve, love, forgive, be the place where God lives, always praying:
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth –
in our families,
in our city,
in this parish,
in our offices,
in the streets of our neighborhoods,
in our schools, in our relationships –
as it is in heaven.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Phrases from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy&oldid=302158730 (accessed July 15, 2009).
[2] Until the last couple hundred years it was widely assumed the Apostle Paul wrote Ephesians from prison to Gentile Christians in Ephesus, a port city on the Mediterranean in Turkey. Today most scholars believe one of Paul’s disciples actually wrote it, and, interestingly, it probably wasn’t specifically to Ephesians. The words “in Ephesus” don’t appear in the earliest manuscripts, so it was originally addressed to “the saints who are faithful in Christ Jesus.” Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997): 620 n.1.
[3] John R. W. Stott, The Message of Ephesians: God’s New Society (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1979): 91-92.
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 2000): 3-4.
[5] Peter T. O’Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999): 220.
©2009 Samuel Wood
